[grishka]

I honestly never understood why on earth QWERTY became the standard for touchscreen text input. It's a good keyboard layout but only when the keys are physical and large enough that you can type with two hands without looking at the thing. But it's absolutely godawful when you have to use it with one finger or two thumbs and no feel. All those dictionary-based crutches that were piled on top of it over time don't help, they only exacerbate the problem, especially considering how laughably poorly they work with languages whose grammar is more complex than English. I've been using touchscreen phones since 2011 yet I somehow still make typos all the time. This suggests that the problem isn't me.

An ideal touchscreen text input method should embrace the strengths of the medium. Touchscreens allow swipes and gestures, so use that to your advantage! Like in the OP, yes. I myself experimented with a similar concept, except it was a 3x4 grid of square buttons that each can input one of 5 characters, one for tap and the other four for each of the directions, inspired by Japanese keyboards. I tried to use it for a day, it worked, but it felt somewhat unnatural. Maybe I haven't given myself enough time to get used to it, or maybe it was a terrible idea to begin with, or maybe the character layout wasn't optimal (I arranged them alphabetically).

Another idea I have is to take the 8pen[1] concept but add more lines, make it 6 or 8, so it's practical for Russian which has 33 letters. Haven't tested this one yet.

I feel like touchscreen text input is a very under-researched area for a world where nearly everyone owns a smartphone.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3OuCR0EpGo

[kristopolous]

Qwerty is the lowest cognitive lift.

Most tech people really don't understand how valuable "not learning shit" is to a product's success

[grishka]

But there isn't that "not learning shit" aspect to it because none of your muscle memory translates between the full-size computer keyboard and the crammed mobile version.

And people somehow learned to type on phone keypads before. No one complained about it once they figured it out in the first hours after getting their first phone.

[kristopolous]

sorry, you don't get it. that isn't learning. People know where everything is but now it's just smaller. It looks the same.

On android, on google keyboard, I can pick layouts like Azerty, Dvorak, Colemak, and ClearFlow. There's also plenty of novel replacements for conventional keyboard style hit boxes using various gestures.

These things are readily available. I've never seen them in the wild.

It's not like these things don't exist. You can switch over right now. The reason you aren't ... that's the learning thing.